Modeling Blowing Snow Over the Tibetan Plateau With the Community Land Model: Method and Preliminary Evaluation

Abstract

Snow cover in mountainous terrain plays an important role in regional and global water and energy balances, climate change, and ecosystems. Blowing snow is a frequent and important weather phenomenon over the Tibetan Plateau (TP); however, this process is neglected in most current land surface models, despite the consequential role it plays in the land surface and atmospheric water and energy budgets. In this paper, we present a blowing snow model PIEKTUK coupled with the Community Land Model (CLM4.5) to provide a better estimate of the snow dynamics for the consideration of snow redistribution induced by wind. Two simulations with a 0.065° spatial resolution were performed in 2010 over the TP, namely, a sensitivity experiment with the inclusion of blowing snow effects (CLM_BS) and a control run with the original model (CLM). A specific objective of this study was to evaluate the improvements in the simulations of snow dynamics and other key variables in surface energy partitioning provided by the coupled model, such as the surface albedo and land surface temperature (LST). Compared with a variety of remote‐sensing observations, the results show that the surface snow cover, snow depth, and surface albedo can be better reproduced in most of the TP region by CLM_BS than by the original CLM, particularly in the Kunlun Mountains, Hoh Xil area, and the southwestern TP. In areas with reduced bias, variations in the monthly mean snow cover fraction can be reflected particularly well by CLM_BS. For LST, however, a significant decrease in the nighttime LST bias was detected in CLM_BS, while the bias in the daytime LST increases. The results show considerable potential for the inclusion of the blowing snow process to promote the modeling of snow dynamics and land‐atmosphere interactions on the TP.

A long-term (2005–2016) dataset of hourly integrated land–atmosphere interaction observations on the Tibetan Plateau

“…2, but for the climatological average of ground temperature and first-layer (except for the observations at depths of 0 cm) soil temperature, soil moisture and soil heat flux. of the cold-region processes, particularly on the TP (Xia et al, 2014;Toure et al, 2016;Orsolini et al, 2019;Xie et al, 2019). Long-term, high-quality and high-temporalresolution observational data in the Third Pole region are not only extremely scarce, but are also very important for a deeper understanding of the key land surface processes.…”

“…Therefore, it also acts as the "Water Tower of Asia" (Immerzeel et al, 2010). Numerous research indicates that the TP plays an essential role in controlling regional and global climate through its thermal and mechanical mechanisms (Manabe and Broccoli, 1990;Yanai et al, 1992;Duan and Wu, 2005;Liu et al, 2007). It exerts major control on atmospheric circulation at the local and continental scale (Ding, 1992;Ye and Wu, 1998;Li et al, 2018) through its latent heat release (Wu et al, 2016) and interactions between the Asian monsoon and midlatitude westerlies (Yao et al, 2012).…”

Decision tree-based detection of blowing snow events in the European Alps

“…The accurate classification of blowing snow events is important in numerical models which include blowing snow, as it determines whether or not invoke the parameterizations for sublimation and transport associated with blowing snow processes in the model (Lenaerts et al, 2012b;Xie et al, 2019). This paper described the construction and evaluation of the machine https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-2021-119 Preprint.…”

“…As discussed above, internal physical properties of the snowpack, such as snow particle bonding, cohesion, and its kinetic properties, greatly influence the strength of snow resistance, which determines the initiation and persistence of blowing snow events (Li and Pomeroy, 1997b;Pomeroy and Gray, 1990;Schmidt, 1980). Previous studies have shown a sharp contrast in the threshold wind speed for snow transport between fresh snow and aged snow (Huang et al, 2008;Liston et al, 2007;Pomeroy 2005;Xie et al, 2019), owing to the strength of the bond between snow particles depending on destructive metamorphism, melting, snow loading, and increased compaction caused by overburden (Li and Pomeroy, 1997a, b;Oleson et al, 2010). Newly fallen snow particles are characteristically soft and powdery, with relatively low density, and are generally drier and less viscous than the deposited snow, making new snow particles much more likely to be lifted by the wind.…”

Assessing the simulated soil hydrothermal regime of the active layer from the Noah-MP land surface model (v1.1) in the permafrost regions of the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau

“…For instance, 19 LSMs in CMIP5 overestimate snow depth over the QTP (Wei and Dong, 2015), which could result in variations in the soil hydrothermal regime with respect to the aspects of magnitude and vector (cooling or warming) (Zhang, 2005). Moreover, most of the existing LSMs are not originally developed for permafrost regions: many of their soil processes are designed for shallow soil layers (Westermann et al, 2016), but permafrost occurs in the deep soil; moreover, the soil column is often considered to be homogeneous, which cannot represent the stratified soil that is common on the QTP (Yang et al, 2005). Given the numerous LSMs and their possible deficiencies, it is necessary to assess the parameterization schemes for permafrost modeling on the QTP, which is helpful for identifying the influential sub-processes, for enhancing our understanding of model behavior and for guiding the improvement of model physics (Zhang et al, 2016).…”